ALBERTO PEPE

Faith in the Algorithm, Part 1

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:58:00 -0800

Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Alberto Pepe

Title: Faith in the Algorithm, Part 1: Beyond the Turing Test

Venue: Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, Edinburgh, Scotland. 2009.

Abstract: Since the Turing test was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, the primary goal of artificial intelligence has been predicated on the ability for computers to imitate human behavior. However, the majority of uses for the computer can be said to fall outside the domain of human abilities and it is exactly outside of this domain where computers have demonstrated their greatest contribution to intelligence. Another goal for artificial intelligence is one that is not predicated on human mimicry, but instead, on human amplification. This article surveys various systems that contribute to the advancement of human and social intelligence.

Twitflick: visualizing the rhythm and narrative of micro-blogging activity

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:15:00 -0800

Authors: Alberto Pepe, Sasank Reddy, Lilly Nguyen, Mark Hansen

Title: Twitflick: visualizing the rhythm and narrative of micro-blogging activity

Venue: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference 2009

Abstract: Micro-blogging is a form of online communication by which users broadcast brief text updates, or tweets. This article explores the temporal component of micro-blogging activity by emphasizing its narrative nature: an individual tweet is an expression of personal online presence at a given time, yet it necessarily embodies the context of a broader developing story. We present Twitflick, a digital media platform that blends a continuous stream of real-time text updates from Twitter with related user-uploaded images hosted on Flickr. Twitflick acts as a space in which distributed, temporally-authentic personal narratives, in the form of photographs and text, reinforce, extend, and even misrepresent each other. The visualizations provided by Twitflick capture the quotidian rhythms of online social exchange and draw attention to the poetic potential of web 2.0.

Memorabilia californiano (california ghost towns, deserts and...

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:45:00 -0800

Memorabilia californiano (california ghost towns, deserts and leftovers). Click here to see the entire set.

Political protest Italian-style

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:50:59 -0800

Authors: Alberto Pepe, Corinna di Gennaro

Title: Political protest Italian–style: The blogosphere and mainstream media in the promotion and coverage of Beppe Grillo’s V–day

Venue: First Monday. Volume 14, Number 12. 7 December 2009

Abstract: We analyze the organization, promotion and public perception of “V–day”, a political rally that took place on 8 September 2007, to protest against corruption in the Italian Parliament. Launched by blogger Beppe Grillo, and promoted via a word–of–mouth mobilization on the Italian blogosphere, V–day brought close to one million Italians in the streets on a single day, but was mostly ignored by mainstream media. This article is divided into two parts. In the first part, we analyze the volume and content of online articles published by both bloggers and mainstream news sources from 14 June (the day V–day was announced) until 15 September 2007 (one week after it took place). We find that the success of V–day can be attributed to the coverage of bloggers and small–scale local news outlets only, suggesting a strong grassroots component in the organization of the rally. We also find a dissonant thematic relationship between content published by blogs and mainstream media: while the majority of blogs analyzed promote V–day, major mainstream media sources critique the methods of information production and dissemination employed by Grillo. Based on this finding, in the second part of the study, we explore the role of Grillo in the organization of the rally from a network analysis perspective. We study the interlinking structure of the V–day blogosphere network, to determine its structure, its levels of heterogeneity, and resilience. Our analysis contradicts the hypothesis that Grillo served as a top–down, broadcast–like source of information. Rather, we find that information about V–day was transferred across heterogeneous nodes in a moderately robust and resilient core network of blogs. We speculate that the organization of V–day represents the very first case, in Italian history, of a political demonstration developed and promoted primarily via the use of social media on the Web.

Andalucía, Spain. July 2009. Click to view this set on flickr.

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Andalucía, Spain. July 2009. Click to view this set on flickr.

Reinventing airspace: spectatorship, fluidity, intimacy at PEK T3

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:54:52 -0700

Author: Alberto Pepe Gentile

Title: Reinventing airspace: spectatorship, fluidity, intimacy at PEK T3

Venue: ACE: Journal of Architecture, City & Environment. Year IV, Issue 10. Pages 9-19. 2009.

Abstract: In this article, I explore the contemporary practice of air travel conceptualizing airports as socio-technical mobilities. Drawing both from the notion of “space” posited by Michel de Certeau and that of “non-place” by Marc Augé, I argue that the supermodern nature of air travel has generated forms of crisis that have embedded themselves in the architecture and the modus operandi of contemporary airports. Airports are necessarily located in a physical and tangible sense, yet their function is so tightly coupled with transience, mobility and spectatorship, that they bring anthropological accounts of “place” to unprecedented extremes. In this article, I analyze three tensions that are inherently bound to the contemporary practice of air travel and that present themselves as symbiotic phenomena: spectatorship/solitude, fluidity/control, intimacy/sameness. I explore the presence and interplay of these tensions in the spatial (spectatorship), technological (fluidity) and physical (intimacy) arrangements of the recently completed Terminal 3 at Beijing’s International Airport.

"Probably they don’t think, the trees; […] But if trees did think, my God, and could..."

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:59:10 -0700

“Probably they don’t think, the trees; […] But if trees did think, my God, and could speak, who knows what the poor things would say to us, who, to provide ourselves with shade, force them to grow in the midst of the city? As they see themselves reflected like this in the shop-windows, they seem to ask what they’re doing here, among all the busy people, amid the noisy bustle of city life. […] They show no sign of having ears. But who can say? Maybe trees, to grow, need silence.”

- Luigi Pirandello. One, No One, One Hundred Thousand. Book Two (XI. Re-entering the city)

epistemological deliverance

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:14:00 -0700

or: how to disable the News Feed on the Facebook

The Facebook recently unveiled a new home page design. One of the new features* is the real time stream:

The stream lets you know what’s happening right now in your world by showing you everything your friends and other connections, such as celebrities, athletes and politicians, are sharing. **

But what if you don’t want to know “what’s happening right now in your world”? Luckily, the new version of the Facebook allows you (the user) to control fairly well what information about your friends goes into the stream and, importantly, what friends it comes from:

When you’re reading the stream to keep up with friends, you’ll see everything that’s happening. Of course, you may be more interested in certain friends. **

Yes, of course. But I am not going to tell the Facebook which friends I “may be more interested in”, especially because this (choosing friends) reminds me of Zizek’s account of love: a structure of imbalance. Following this line of thought, to ensure equality and balance, one has two options: a) to be updated on (i.e. to know about) ALL their friends or b) NONE of them. I chose the latter. I embarked on a social epistemology experiment and decided to (ab?)use this new feature of the Facebook, thus hiding all my friends from my news feed. Result (after some 400 clicks):

* Is this really new? Didn’t they call it “Live feed” in the previous version?

** Parts in Italic are from the Facebook Blog

"The text of pleasure is not necessarily the text that recounts pleasures; the text of bliss is never..."

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:33:00 -0700

“The text of pleasure is not necessarily the text that recounts pleasures; the text of bliss is never the text that recounts the kind of bliss afforded literally by an ejaculation. The pleasure of representation is not attached to its object: pornography is not sure.”

- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.

Definitions:
1. Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.
2. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

"The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot"

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:30:23 -0800

“The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot”

- Werner Herzog. Discussion and Film Concert at Royce Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles. 20 February 2009

Lazy webs

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:33:00 -0800

My friend Karen Van Godtsenhoven asked me some questions about the semantic web (and how it is related to laziness), for the latest issue of The Word Magazine. To read the article, go to the online issue (January-February 2009). The article is on pages 44-47. Alternatively you can download a PDF of the article. You can also find The Word in print, in Belgium and in good bookstores worldwide.

"If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us."

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:15:00 -0800

“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”

- A man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool. (From Harper’s Notebook, February 2009)

Review: "Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective"

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:05:00 -0800

This week, I had the pleasure to read a manuscript titled “Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective”, recently authored by my friends and colleagues Marko A. Rodriguez and Jennifer H. Watkins at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors present agent-based simulations of two collective decision making systems that can be used for societal-scale governance.

Rodriguez and Watkins reiterate that from a statistical viewpoint, optimal decision making is best approximated by ensuring the appropriate conditions realized by the Condorcet jury theorem. The theorem provides a theoretical basis for democracy; it states that a group of decision makers will achieve the optimal decision provided that the group is large enough (i.e. the size of the population tends toward infinity) and that the probability of each decision maker choosing the best of two options is larger than 0.5. Thus, the two conditions for a successful outcome of Condorcet’s jury theorem are population size and individual knowledge to make a decision. Rodriguez and Watkins suggest a means to achieve these conditions by: (i) approximating the largest possible population via a dynamically distributed democratic system that propagates voting
“power” to active voters in a trust-based social network; and (ii) delegating different decisions to specific groups of decision makers via the implementation of an incentive decision market model, on the basis that different decision makers possess different types of knowledge that are most useful to make different decisions. Simulation data presented in the paper show both a smaller average error and a higher proportion of correct decisions made when dynamically distributed democracy and incentive market are used, as opposed to direct democracy and incentive-free market, respectively.

The overarching thesis of the paper is that present day governments do not make appropriate use of the technological advances of the Information Age to develop modern governance and decision making systems: “many of today’s government structures are remnants of the technological constraints of the eighteenth century”. A critique is necessary: was this level of democracy the original intent of the
thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment? One might consider the social, cultural, economic, racial and gender-based barriers that existed in the eighteenth century to argue that it wasn’t solely the technological (as well as the logistical) impediment that prevented the implementation of more direct types of democracy in governance systems; rather, many Enlightenment thinkers may well have preferred governance to remain an activity of the (albeit broadened) elite classes, technological limitations notwithstanding.

Yet, perhaps the question of the Enlightenment thinkers’ original intent is beside the point. If it is our intent to achieve more optimal decisions through a decision making system involving universal suffrage, the fact is that the technologies currently relied upon by our governments to achieve this goal are unnecessarily burdened by the limitations of the past, both perceptual, and technological.

For this reason, Rodriguez’s and Watkins’ paper is important and necessary, both to advance research in e-governance and to increase awareness in the general public. The embrace and implementation of the technology offered by web-based social networks, recommendation algorithms, and collective decision making systems, should be a
crucial priority for the development of future governance systems, and as technological advances continue apace, these issues will only become more important.

Note. An excerpt of this post appears on the Collective Decision Making Systems Blog. Many thanks to Chris Starr for reading the paper and providing his comments from a socio-political perspective.

Photos from the Argentina trip are up on flickr: Buenos Aires,...

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:19:00 -0800

Photos from the Argentina trip are up on flickr: Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Ruta 40 and Patagonia.

(In the photo above, a parking lot in Microcentro, Buenos Aires)

"The first protons were circulated around the Large Hadron Collider. Designed to help physicists..."

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:05:23 -0800

“The first protons were circulated around the Large Hadron Collider. Designed to help physicists explain the existence of mass, some feared the experiment would create a gigantic black hole. Wall Street’s collapse just a few days after the LHC was switched on was deemed a coincidence.”

- The Economist. January 3, 2009.

A Clustering-Based Semi-Automated Technique to Build Cultural Ontologies

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:55:00 -0800

Authors: Ramesh Srinivasan, Alberto Pepe, Marko A. Rodriguez

Title: A Clustering-Based Semi-Automated Technique to Build Cultural Ontologies

Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Volume 60, Number 2, Pages 1-13. 2009.

Abstract: This article presents and validates a clustering-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semiautomated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce cognate ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of fluid ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, US). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semiautomated solution best optimizes among issues of interoperability and scalability, deemphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage.

* Preprint also available on eScholarship, here.

A Grateful Dead Analysis

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:55:18 -0800

Authors: Marko A. Rodriguez, Vadas Gintautas, Alberto Pepe

Title: A Grateful Dead Analysis: The Relationship Between Concert and Listening Behavior

Venue: First Monday, volume 14, number 1, 2009.

Abstract: The Grateful Dead were an American band that was born out of the San Francisco, California psychedelic movement of the 1960s. The band played music together from 1965 to 1995 and is well known for concert performances containing extended improvisations and long and unique set lists. This article presents a comparative analysis between 1,590 of the Grateful Dead’s concert set lists from 1972 to 1995 and 2,616,990 last.fm Grateful Dead listening events from August 2005 to October 2007. While there is a strong correlation between how songs were played in concert and how they are listened to by last.fm members, the outlying songs in this trend identify interesting aspects of the band and their fans 10 years after the band’s dissolution.

* Preprint also available on arXiv, here.

"The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind"

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:52:57 -0800

“The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind”

- Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual”

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David...

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:11:00 -0800

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) is not an essay about Las Vegas. The “fun thing” Wallace refers to is a 1-week trip on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Yet, reading the essay, I cannot help but notice the “(nearly lethal)” analogies between his adventure on the luxury cruise and my perception of Vegas.

"Regardless of how the next four years go, this is a moment of rupture in the way this country..."

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:43:00 -0800

“Regardless of how the next four years go, this is a moment of rupture in the way this country conceives itself and its narrative. It’s that rupture that we’re celebrating. Ruptures, however small, are the only way to create openings, to create room for a tangent or a shift in a narrative.”

- Talar Chahinian. On the election of Barack Hussein Obama. Private communication.